Perfectly astute reflections on the three haps:
1. happiness, 2. mishaps, and 3. happenstances at both ends of The Empire State – The Middling City and The Shiney Apple. And elsewhere, if need be.

"Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature." - Cicero

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

As is my wont, there was Yours Truly, minding mine own photographic business and documenting the amazing feats of a group of people. Today it was IT types.

Who was the famed precursor who stated that Ninety percent of what it means to be a successful photog is the rearranging of furniture and the like.What I would add, after a majority of life years in the business of making photons bend to my desires and those of my clients, is that the photo business is mainly talent, as well as a knack for the moving of furniture and the dispensing of fear and self-consciousness when the need arises to scale belltowers, jump onto risky window sills that open out to the world below, and scramble across floors of questionable cleanliness.

After the shoot with the group of smarty-pants was asked to document the re-org'ing of the quad outside the Big U's older, city-edge campus.Exactly the spot where YT et many al's once rested our weary undergraduate bones in front of huge plate glass windows in the Fillmore Room where a fireplace blazed away.Where YT picked up her daily NYT across the way, in the bookstore, and watched passersby in the quad, crisscrossing the walkways under semi-oldgrowth trees.Where infamous precursors at UUAB (where YT was Cultural & Performing Arts Chair for four years) did folk and rock shows for a portion of the masses.And where students frequently tossed handfuls of student papers to fuel the fire.YT recalls a small scandal whereby a rival publication burnt to a crisp copies of one of the papers where YT worked hard as reporter/poetry editor - The Alternative Press/Alternative News Collective mentored by Tolstoy College's wondrous Charlie Haynie.Ahhh, the mems.And O the bulldozing crisscrossing of tire tracks as the quad is revamped, its mechanicals being modernized. I noted a breech in the construction fence, and that it had none of the usual warnings about having to wear a hard hat in the area and such, and went around said fence to make more advantageous images of the Progress in Progress - an inescapable phrase from when the Middling City was being subtly blasted up and down Main Street to create its semi-sub-way. Progress in Progress was a slogan that was painted on a wooden barricade that YT had to navigate around in the teen years to go to classes on this verysame campus.YT asked the handler du jour if the large and cleared center space would, perhaps, be a lovely new fountain that might, ideally, attract some of the ducks that enjoy nearby Glen Falls Park.He did not know.YT asks those types of semi-unanswerable questions.

+ Yours Truly +

Yours Truly began writing poetry and making images with her father's Kodak 620 at the insightful age of seven. Some details have changed. Many journeys have been taken. Many images made. Much ink and pixels spilled, shared, commissioned, and the like.